Human-caused Climate Research Articles

Anticipating responses to climate change and planning for resilience in California’s freshwater ecosystems

As human-caused climate changes accelerate, California will experience hydrologic and temperature conditions different than any encountered in recorded history. How will these changes affect the state’s freshwater ecosystems? Rivers, lakes, and wetlands are managed as a water resource, but they also support a complex web of life, ranging from bacteria, fungi, and algae to macrophytes, woody plants, invertebrates, fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals. In much of the state, native freshwater organisms already struggle to survive massive water diversions and dams, deteriorating water quality, extensive land cover modification for agriculture and urban development, and invasions of exotic species. In the face of climate change, we need to expand efforts to recover degraded ecosystems and to protect the resilience, health, and viability of existing ecosystems. For this, more process-based understanding of river, lake, and wetlands ecosystems is needed to forecast how systems will respond to future climate change and to our interventions. This will require 1) expanding our ability to model mechanistically how freshwater biota and ecosystems respond to environmental change; 2) hypothesis-driven monitoring and field studies; 3) education and training to build research, practitioner, stewardship, and policy capabilities; and 4) developing tools and policies for building resilient ecosystems. A goals-driven, hypothesis-informed collaboration among tribes, state (and federal) agencies, nongovernmental organizations, academicians, and consultants is needed to accomplish these goals and to advance the skills and knowledge of the future workforce of practitioners, regulators, and researchers who must live with the climate changes that are already upon us and will intensify.

Increasing intensity and frequency of cold fronts contributed to Australia’s 2019–2020 Black Summer fire disaster

Human-caused climate changes are increasing the risk of dangerous wildfires in many regions of the world. There are multiple, compounding aspects of climate change that are increasing fire risk, including large-scale climate changes driving hotter and drier conditions that are generally well observed and predicted. However, changes in synoptic-scale processes that can exacerbate dangerous fire weather and promote extreme pyroconvective events are often not well known in historical observations and are poorly represented in climate models, making it difficult to fully quantify and anticipate changing fire risk. In this study, we statistically test the association between synoptic-scale cold front passage and large fires in southeast Australia during Australia’s 2019–2020 ‘Black Summer’ fire disaster, and analyse daily gridded temperature data to detect long-term changes in the intensity and frequency of strong cold fronts over southeast Australia. We demonstrate that the passage of cold fronts over southeast Australia significantly increased the likelihood of large fire days during the entire Black Summer fire season. Additionally, the intensity and frequency of strong cold front events were anomalously high during the Black Summer, and this is part of a long-term significant increase in the intensity and frequency of strong cold fronts since the 1950s. These changes in fire-promoting cold front activity are expected to imminently emerge above the range of historical experience across large areas of southeast Australia if current trends continue. Our results provide new insights into a previously poorly constrained contributor to fire risk in southeast Australia, highlighting the potential of synoptic-scale weather changes to compound previously documented broad-scale climate changes in intensifying future forest fire risk.

The Readiness for ESG among Retail Investors in Central and Eastern Europe. The Example of Poland

Despite a considerable volume of literature on the environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) investments, most studies have focused on the perspective of managers and investors in markets with developed ethical funds. This study complements previous studies by exploring the retail investors’ attitude toward ESG in Poland as a Central and Eastern European country (CEE) with a minor but developing sustainable investment market. While EU ESG regulations focus mostly on disclosure obligations, this study aims to determine whether retail investors in Poland are interested in ESG and identifies the conditions for the investors’ interest. The binomial logistic regression is applied to retail investors based on data from a survey of a representative sample of the Polish population. The results show that Poles consider human-caused climate changes as an important challenge and most of those willing to invest in the capital market want to do so in a sustainable way. However, they are unwilling to sacrifice their profits for the sake of ESG. Only those investors who make investment decisions based on social aspects are more likely to forgo a part of their profits. Women are more willing to engage in responsible investments and forgo higher profits.

Greater than 99% consensus on human caused climate change in the peer-reviewed scientific literature

While controls over the Earth’s climate system have undergone rigorous hypothesis-testing since the 1800s, questions over the scientific consensus of the role of human activities in modern climate change continue to arise in public settings. We update previous efforts to quantify the scientific consensus on climate change by searching the recent literature for papers sceptical of anthropogenic-caused global warming. From a dataset of 88125 climate-related papers published since 2012, when this question was last addressed comprehensively, we examine a randomized subset of 3000 such publications. We also use a second sample-weighted approach that was specifically biased with keywords to help identify any sceptical peer-reviewed papers in the whole dataset. We identify four sceptical papers out of the sub-set of 3000, as evidenced by abstracts that were rated as implicitly or explicitly sceptical of human-caused global warming. In our sample utilizing pre-identified sceptical keywords we found 28 papers that were implicitly or explicitly sceptical. We conclude with high statistical confidence that the scientific consensus on human-caused contemporary climate change—expressed as a proportion of the total publications—exceeds 99% in the peer reviewed scientific literature.

Transitions to freshwater sustainability

Fundamental transitions in natural resources technologies, institutions, and management approaches are often difficult to see in advance, or even in the midst, of actual changes. Such a transformation now appears to be underway for freshwater resources, driven by increasingly severe water-related crises around the world. These include mismatches between supply and demand; the continued failure to meet basic human needs for water and sanitation; expanding ecological degradation due to extraction of water from natural systems and human-caused climate changes; the development of new technologies for using, treating, monitoring, and reporting on water use; new conceptual work; and growing attention given to water issues by the public and scientific communities. Similar transitions, with additional implications for water, also appear to be underway in the energy and climate fields. For such transitions to be successful, it is important to understand what drives deep changes in the perceptions, management, and use of natural resources; the factors that encourage or discourage changes; and whether strategies can be developed to improve and accelerate those changes that lead to social, economic, and environmental sustainability goals. This paper addresses the concept of resource or environmental transitions in the context of freshwater; reviews theories, data, and frameworks for identifying and analyzing transitions; offers some examples; and identifies key policies to help manage effective and successful transitions.

Déjà Vu All Over Again

What is accepted by the scientific community on the basis of overwhelming evidence, yet opposed by a vocal minority on ideological grounds, and therefore the target of attempts to undermine its presentation in the science classrooms of the public schools? If your answer was evolution , help yourself to a gold star. After all, in the 90 years since the Scopes Trial, the teaching of evolution has been the leading source of controversy in American science education. But if your answer was anthropogenic climate change , you, too, can give yourself a gold star. Like evolution, anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change offers challenges – but also opportunities – to biology teachers. The facts are clear. Global temperature has increased rapidly and significantly over the past 150 years, and human activity, especially the burning of fossil fuels, has been, and is, a major cause of the rise in temperature. The resulting changes to the climate will have (indeed are already having) disruptive – potentially disastrous – effects on human societies and the natural world. The multiple, independent, and converging lines of evidence for anthropogenic climate change have been acknowledged as convincing by the scientific community, including the National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society (2014) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS, 2014). Owing to the disruptive, widespread, and interconnected effects of the rise in …

Tree recruitment, growth, and distribution at the circumpolar forest–tundra transition: introduction

Causes and consequences of changes in the circumpolar forest–tundra transition have received recent interest due to the increasing awareness of human-caused global climate change. The International Polar Year core project PPS Arctic focused these topics through exploring processes, changes, and spatiotemporal variability of biotic and abiotic drivers of change in the forest–tundra transition. The papers in this special feature present constraints and drivers of tree recruitment and tree encroachment of tundra areas, climate – tree growth relations in the ecotone, and changes in tree spatial pattern across the forest–tundra ecotone.

Right to Carbon or Right to Life: Human Rights Approaches to Climate Change

The limitations of compliance mechanisms under international environmental law suggest that we should look to the usefulness of claims of human rights violations. At least three forums might be used for litigation regarding climate change: international courts or compliance bodies, international human rights bodies, and national courts either applying international law or adjudicating human rights claims under domestic law. If we come to see human-caused global climate change as violating fundamental substantive or procedural human rights, perhaps we can make a breakthrough in the policy debates to move our politics and jurisprudence toward a solution based on rights claims.